Blowers repel killer whales with diarrhea bombs

Scientists say it's a kind of defense mechanism, a bit like octopuses releasing ink to cover water.

In this case, the water was cloudy due to the watery feces of a group of puffer fish that had been attacked by killer whales off Western Australia.

“This is called defensive defecation,” he told . Letters of News Jenna Tucker, a marine biologist who happened to notice an unusual occurrence in Bremer Canyon, an area where tourists flock to admire the whales.

Tucker was on a tour boat when the blow whales formed a circle, their heads in the middle and their tails out, to fend off the hungry killer whales.

When a red-brown spot suddenly appeared on the surface of the water, everyone thought it was blood.

“Everyone in the boat stopped talking and got serious because we thought so [οι όρκες] “They attacked a young blower,” Tucker said.

“But then the killer whales suddenly started moving away.”

The biologist and her colleagues did not understand exactly what happened until they returned to the laboratory and watched the video of the incident again. They then realized that it was not blood, but rather a “cloud of diarrhea,” as the researcher described it.

“Because pufferfish feed primarily on squid, their feces are red,” Tucker commented. The trick “appears to have worked in this case,” he said.

As he explained, flies can defecate at will and then move their tails up and down to propel the diarrhea toward the enemy.

However, since this behavior has not been observed in the past, defecation cannot be ruled out as an accident.

However, so far, only a few such attacks have been recorded against killer whales, which are much larger than killer whales.

However, the only known incident in which killer whales attacked a blue whale occurred in the same area of ​​the Merimer Valley.